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Sunday, 24 February 2013

Peace on the streets? How two gangs in Birmingham found common ground

A brutal dispute between street gangs blighted Birmingham for 20 years, making national headlines in 2003 when two teenage girls were shot dead. But an uneasy truce reigns now, brokered by a former cabinet minister and a film-maker, who tells the story in an extraordinary documentary, One Mile Away

Ashley "Woody" Woodcock was 15 and hanging clothes on a washing line in his back garden when a bullet came whistling towards him. At first, he didn't understand what was happening but when he looked at his hand, he saw it was bleeding. The edge of his palm had been skimmed by the shot, a wound that would leave a burned-out blackened scar that is still visible now, 10 years later.

Matthias "Shabba" Thompson is 33. He was shot in the leg a few years back. He was in such a state of shock that he didn't even notice until he jumped in a car to escape and tried to press the accelerator. His leg wouldn't move. When he glanced down, he saw swollen flesh and a thin stream of blood trickling from two small holes.

Joel "YT" Ecclestone is 21, and says he has seen so many people get shot he's lost count. Once, he witnessed someone felled by a hail of fire from an AK47. Another time, he watched a man's hand "open like a flower" from a bullet wound.

Daniel Davidson is 25 and has violent dreams. Sometimes he dreams that he's doing the shooting. Sometimes he's being shot at. He has these dreams "all the time. It's just normal."

These young men are not living in a war zone. Nor are they growing up in a far-flung country, riven by poverty or civil unrest. They live inBirmingham, and are divided by little more than a postcode.

Until recently, these men had been involved in one of the most vicious gangland feuds in the UK, in the city with the highest concentration of gun crime in the country. They had been stabbed and shot at and had retaliated in kind. They existed on the streets, caught up in a criminal network of drugs and guns. They had seen their friends killed and their relatives go to prison.

"I've been stabbed, I've been shot twice," says Thompson. "I've felt the wrath of this thing."

For years, this wrathful thing raged on – between the "Johnsons" from the B6 postcode and the "Burgers" from B21. Police intervention foundered. Government initiatives fell by the wayside. Community groups failed to implement any kind of reconciliation. At its height, the internecine feud claimed the lives of two women caught in the crossfire: Letisha Shakespeare, 17, and Charlene Ellis, 18, who were shot outside a hair salon in Aston at a New Year's party in January 2003. The double murder garnered extensive media coverage. After that, rival gang members continued to kill one another with startling regularity, but their deaths were deemed less newsworthy. It seemed everyone just got used to it.

But now, thanks to the intervention of a documentary-maker, a former cabinet minister and one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace process, the two warring sides have done what once seemed not merely impossible but unthinkable: they have reached a truce. As a result, incidents of violent crime in the two postcodes have halved.

Today, a handful of former gang members are sitting around a table in a community centre in Aston. A year ago, they would have been more likely to try to kill one another than share the same room. And yet here they are: working together to run a social enterprise that provides school workshops and mentoring schemes for teenagers with the aim of keeping impressionable young boys out of gang culture. These days, they have exchanged weapons for laptop computers and whiteboards. Their modest offices are littered with workshop packs and to-do lists. They are keen to get into several local schools before the Easter break because there is a higher prevalence of adolescents joining gangs over the holidays.

"A lot of people want to make the change but they don't know how," says Simeon "Zimbo" Moore, 36, who runs the social enterprise scheme and was once affiliated with the Johnsons. "There's only one way [to live] we've been brought up to know… You have to make the youths understand what work is, you have to give them a vision of what it is because they think work is just a hustle, a grind.

"The only images they see are the chains, the cars, half-naked girls – this is what they're aspiring to. But they should be aspiring to be running businesses, to ownership of property. We should be building skills, offering an alternative."

Moore is spry, sharp and clever. Unlike many gang members who find themselves excluded from school as teenagers, he did well in his exams and was a straight-A student. But being in the gang was what the smart kids did. It seemed better than working for a living.

The lure of the gang lifestyle for young men such as Moore is a real and current problem – a 2004 Home Office survey found that up to 6% of 10- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales belong to a gang. In London, according to the Metropolitan Police, gang crime is responsible for 22% of serious violence, 17% of robbery and half of all shootings. Outside the capital, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool gangs account for 65% of all firearm homicides in the UK.

But in Birmingham, at least, there is cause for optimism. "Now there are no sides," Moore says. "I don't see borders or divisions. I deal with everyone on an individual level."

Sitting next to him, plugged into an Apple Mac, is Tobeijah Atkinson, 27, a Burger Boy who used to be Moore's sworn enemy. He takes out his earphones and nods, his eyes half-obscured by the pushed-down peak of his baseball cap.

"There's a Johnson and a Burger and they're carbon copies of each other," Atkinson says. "How can I hate someone in the exact same predicament as me?"

"We come from the same background," Moore agrees. "Totally."

The extraordinary story of how two bitterly divided gangland factions come to be sitting together at the same table is told in a forthcoming film.One Mile Away – so-called because one mile is all that divides the two postcodes – was made by acclaimed documentary-maker Penny Woolcock and won the prestigious Michael Powell award for best feature film at the Edinburgh film festival last year. Woolcock was already well-known in Birmingham because of her groundbreaking work on 1 Day, a 2009 hip-hop musical set against the backdrop of gun crime in the city and starring Dylan Duffus, an untrained actor plucked from the streets and affiliated with the Burgers.

In the summer of 2010, Woolcock got a phone call out of the blue from Matthias Thompson, a Johnson, who wanted her to act as a neutral go-between for the two sides to explore the idea of a truce.

"I wanted to be able to look back when I was older and say I'd made history," Thompson says now of that initial phone call. "I wanted to stop the violence rather than waste our energy running each other down."

Woolcock agreed to help. She set up a meeting between Thompson and Duffus.

"I was sick of seeing people get killed," Duffus explains. "When people in this community get murdered, it doesn't make the news. You're just dead."

The gangland battle in inner-city Birmingham had been raging for the best part of 20 years. In the 1990s, an altercation over a woman escalated and ended in murder. The Aston crew took their name from a local fish bar – Johnsons. The other faction, who used to congregate at a burger bar near the Sikh temple, called themselves the Burger Boys. The split divided families and friendship groups. Many of the gang members were related. Their parents went to church together.

The rival gangs evolved in an era of heightened racial tension: there had been race riots in 1981 and again in 1985 and the West Midlands police were accused of heavy-handedness in their tactics. Even now, hatred of the police runs deep. According to Duffus: "If you're born black, [the police think] you're born a criminal."

With unemployment always high, working for a gang, with its complex web of loyalty, peer pressure and family ties, became the normal way for a certain type of young boy to make a living. Often these boys had absent fathers, as was the case with Joel Ecclestone.

"My dad is a big anger source," Ecclestone says. "If there was an argument on the street, there was no dad to stop and say, 'Don't do that.' My role models were gangbangers."

For kids such as Ecclestone, the gang became a new, male family. Hanging out on the streets, dabbling in illegal activity, was how they kept themselves occupied. It's what their friends were doing. They felt ignored by the system and unfairly targeted by police. A generation of young men got drawn into drugs, guns and other criminality.

"It's what you grow up with," says Moore. "It's normality. It's not hard, it's not easy, it's just life." He believes that adolescents join gangs because of four main factors: low aspirations, low self-worth, an absence of law-abiding male role models and peer pressure. Between the ages of 13 and 17, he says, there doesn't seem to be any viable alternative: "It's self-hatred. This is why he [a Burger] don't like me [a Johnson]: because I see myself in him."

As a gang member, you get used to living your life on the road, looking over your shoulder, constantly on the brink of paranoia in case you unwittingly venture into enemy territory. There are certain unspoken rules you live by. When you drive a car, it has to be a rental so that you can look flash and keep up appearances, but also so that you can change it regularly and the police can't trace you. When you're at the wheel, you sit leaning back, low down in your seat so that your face is hidden. You always make sure you can reverse out of a situation. You never drive down a dead-end. You should preferably travel with at least two other people.

"Trust is a luxury," Duffus says. "You have to stay on point."

Atkinson likens daily life as a gang member to depression. "If you wake up every morning and you've got to fear for your life and you're being stereotyped by people, you become numb to life and situations. I'd wake up and think: 'I'm supposed to get shot at.'"

And all too often, these young men will see their friends die. They get used to it. A necessary detachment seeps in. Time and again, they tell me that they felt "cold" when they saw someone killed.

"At one stage, I was going to funerals regular," says Ashley Woodcock. Many of them will go to prison. Most of the men I speak to have done time, for crimes ranging from gun possession to attempted murder.

What keeps a gang together in this chaotic environment? Pride and tribal loyalty. A distrust of outside authority. A belief that the police are out to get you because of your colour or your background. In a gang, your peers will stand up for you. Battles will be fought in other people's names and unity is forged in opposition. If someone shows disrespect, however trivial, there will be retribution. Like the mafia or the mob, this is a criminal fraternity based on blood.

At first, Woolcock had little idea what she was getting herself into. "It took up all of my life," she says. "It was 18 months full-time from that phone call with Shabba [Thompson] and I was completely out of my depth. You talk to the individuals and everybody knows that it's wrong. I had this idea that they'd all come together and I'd film them all becoming friends. Of course, it wasn't like that. I realised I was being completely naive."

The problem was that while Duffus and Thompson agreed the violence should end, the "gang-bangers" on both sides took a lot of persuading. Neither of them could get any traction within their communities. Initially, there was a total lack of trust. Several times during filming, Woolcock feared for her life and the lives of her two protagonists. There were false rumours that she was working for the police or that money was involved or that the whole film was a set-up.

"Sometimes I was threatened with guns, which was not very nice," Woolcock says, calmly running a hand through cropped, dyed red hair. She is a softly spoken woman, powered by a kind of frenetic energy. Physically, she resembles Helen Mirren, for whom she is often mistaken. She is quite possibly the last person you would expect to see caught up in the criminal underworld.

"But if someone killed me," she continues, "they'd do their time, it would be written about in the paper because I'm white, middle-class and reasonably well-known. Whereas if one of them had been killed, it would be just 'another black man's died'. Sometimes I did feel frightened for myself but mostly I was frightened for them and the naive way I was putting them in danger."

For a year, there was deadlock. Thompson and Duffus tried to get key gangland figures on board without success. People kept getting killed. Even the word "truce" was deemed too dangerous to speak out loud. On Boxing Day 2010, a man was shot in the leg at Birmingham's Bullring shopping centre. During filming, a 15-year-old was stabbed to death. No one could really remember what they were fighting for.

Woolcock came close to breaking point. "I thought: 'What on earth am I doing? I'm not making a film. I'm not a conflict resolutionist.'" In the end, she stuck with it, "out of sheer bloody-mindedness".

Slowly, slivers of progress began to appear through the gloom. After protracted and painstaking negotiations, major players from both sides began to warm to the idea. Moore, a talented rapper who had a following of more than 200,000 on a YouTube channel where he posted his home-made music videos, was one of the key figures to sign up. He came on board with big ambitions: "What really needed to change was the whole lifestyle – not just the gang," he says. "It was the mentality."

At around the same time, the film's producer, former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell, set up a meeting with diplomat Jonathan Powell, one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement. There is an unforgettable scene in One Mile Away where Powell and Purnell are shown sitting on one side of a long conference table, facing three gang members over neatly cut sandwiches and bowls of fresh fruit. Powell warned them all it would be a long and difficult process, but that the most important thing was "to keep pedalling the bicycle".

"I did see interesting parallels and echoes from not just Northern Ireland but other conflicts as well," says Powell, over the phone. "With armed groups like the IRA or gangs you tend to find that they only talk to themselves. They exist in a cultural and physical ghetto with very little idea of what the outside world thinks of them. One of the first things is to persuade them to see the other person's point of view… Once you get people talking, it mustn't break down.

"You have to take a lot of personal and political pain to keep this going and there will be setbacks… What really matters with implementation is that you have to stick to it."

And ultimately, they did stick to it – to the astonishment of almost everyone. The nationwide riots of 2011 had an unexpected impact. After the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in north London, the Birmingham gang members began to question why they were directing their anger at one another when there were broader injustices to be fought.

Today, a kind of peace exists in the streets on either side of Birchfield Road; the truce is not official and there was never the neat reconciliation of smiles and shaking hands that Woolcock had hoped for.

"But what did happen is that significant people on both sides started working together and building up trusting relationships," she says.

The production team are now in regular contact with the One Mile Away social enterprise, providing business mentoring. Woolcock herself regularly makes the trip to Birmingham, where she is clearly well-respected by the people she filmed. The key, she says, has been the involvement of those actively involved in the gang lifestyle. From the start, this was a grassroots movement rather than an initiative imposed from on high.

"To have the people who were inflaming that war in the first place to turn round and say, 'Actually, it's dumb' is much more powerful," Woolcock explains. "It's becoming more cool not to be in a gang now."

Jonathan Powell believes the process could be rolled out to tackle other gangland feuds: "Am I optimistic? Yes. There's no such thing as an insoluble armed conflict or gang conflict."

The need is pressing. Gangland killings in different parts of the country continue – earlier this month, three young black men were killed in south London over the course of a weekend. In Birmingham, there is a tangible sense that violence still pulses close to the surface. Last week, one of the young men featured in the film was charged with a murder he claims he didn't commit. The film-makers had lost touch with him in recent months as he had moved to a different area.

Dividing lines still exist. Not everyone thinks the truce is a good idea. Joel Ecclestone is uneasy posing for the Observer photograph because he has to be driven through enemy territory to get to the location. As he stands waiting for the picture to be taken, his eyes are restlessly scanning the horizon. He seems to exist in a perpetual state of heightened awareness, primed and ready for whatever might come his way.

But in this small patch of the city there is, at last, the existence of a commodity that has been in short supply. There is hope. And there is a determination from young men such as Simeon, Matthias, Dylan, Ashley, Joel, Tobeijah and Daniel that their children will not grow up in the same way they did.

"I was willing to risk my life for stupidity," Ecclestone says after the photo has been taken, "so I might as well risk it for something good."

It is a fragile peace, but every day that it lasts, it grows a little stronger.

One Mile Away opens at cinemas on 29 March. It will be shown on Channel 4 in April.

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